Alcalá de Henares: Cervantes' birthplace and Cisneros' university: a self-guided walk
By Alleytale
Cervantes' birthplace, Cisneros' university
Alcalá is where Miguel de Cervantes was born and baptized, and where Cardinal Cisneros founded a university in 1499, so the walk goes from the house where the writer was born to the archbishops' palace and cathedral, then back through the old colleges.
The stops
This rectangular square, 200 metres long and 60 wide, began as the town's market ground, and a yearly fair granted by King Alfonso VIII in 1184 was held here. Since 1879 it has carried the name of Miguel de Cervantes, Alcalá's favourite son, and the statue of him at its centre, by Carlo Nicoli, was unveiled on 9 October 1879. The Calle Mayor leaves from one of its corners.
Photo: santiago lopez-pastor — CC BY-SA 2.0 Built in 1601 and 1602 to a design by Francisco Sánchez, this courtyard theatre is one of the oldest preserved in Europe. It was given a roof in 1769, later worked as a Romantic theatre and then as a cinema, and after a long restoration it reopened on 3 June 2003. Today it stages plays again.
Photo: Evaizeta — CC BY-SA 3.0 es Luis de Antezana and his wife Isabel de Guzmán founded this hospital by will in 1483, and a papal bull of Sixtus IV allowed the old hospital of San Julián and Santa Catalina to move in 1484 into the couple's house on Calle Mayor, where it still serves as a home for older people. Ignatius of Loyola lived and worked here as a nurse and cook for the sick in 1526 and 1527, when he was a student in Alcalá, and the kitchen he used is preserved. Outside, the Calle Mayor is a pedestrian street 396 metres long, and around 1500 Cardinal Cisneros ordered its wooden posts replaced with stone columns, mostly taken from the Roman town of Complutum.
Photo: Sol Manglano — CC BY-SA 4.0 Miguel de Cervantes was born in Alcalá in 1547. The traditional birthday, 29 September, is not well documented, and the one firm date is his baptism on 9 October. The historian Luis Astrana Marín published his finding in 1948 that the birth house stood on this spot, when it had already been demolished, and the present museum, built in 1956, recreates a comfortable home of the 16th and 17th centuries with objects from medicine, the profession of his father, Rodrigo.
Photo: MottaW — CC BY 4.0 The museum fills the former Dominican college-convent of Madre de Dios, founded in 1565 by María de Mendoza as part of the university city, though the building you see dates from the 17th and 18th centuries. After the convent was seized in 1835 its convent quarters served as a prison until 1951, and the museum opened here in 1999. Its Roman collection includes mosaics from Complutum, the Roman-era Alcalá de Henares.
Photo: Outisnn — CC BY-SA 3.0 Cardinal Bernardo de Sandoval y Rojas, archbishop of Toledo and a patron of Lope de Vega, Quevedo, Góngora and Cervantes, founded this Cistercian convent in 1613, and the building went up between 1617 and 1626. It is attributed to Juan Gómez de Mora, who also designed Madrid's Plaza Mayor. Its church has an elliptical plan under an oval dome of timber and plaster that is the largest of its kind in Spain.
Photo: Emilio J. Rodríguez Posada — CC BY-SA 2.0 Alcalá belonged to the archbishops of Toledo, who kept a residence here, first a Mudéjar fortress commissioned in 1209 and later fortified by Archbishop Pedro Tenorio, whose name the surviving Tenorio tower carries. Catherine of Aragon, the youngest daughter of the Catholic Monarchs and later queen of England, was born in the palace, and on 20 January 1486 Queen Isabella I held her first interview here with Christopher Columbus about financing his voyage. A fire in 1939 destroyed two thirds of the complex.
Photo: Zarateman — CC0 Cardinal Lorenzana, archbishop of Toledo, paid for this gate in the form of a triumphal arch, which was inaugurated on 4 December 1788 under Charles III to replace a medieval gate in the old walls that was narrow and bent, and made entering the town difficult. An inscription names the archbishop on the city side and the king and the year on the outer side. It is considered the last architectural work of Alcalá's splendour, and Madrid's own Puerta de Alcalá, ten years older, stands in geographic correspondence with it.
Photo: Neagelica — CC BY-SA 3.0 es Together with St Peter's in Leuven, this is one of only two churches in the world with the title Magistral, because all of its canons had to be doctors of theology. A chapel was built in 414 on the place where, by legend, the boys Justus and Pastor were martyred, and the present Isabelline Gothic church was built from 1497 in the time of Cardinal Cisneros, with a tower begun in 1528 that took its present look in 1618. Cisneros's remains are kept in the cathedral, while the marble tomb made for him stands in the university chapel at the end of this walk.
Photo: Neagelica — CC BY-SA 3.0 es A Portuguese nobleman, Baron Jorge de Paz de Silveira, left the estate for this college, and after his death his widow Beatriz saw it built in the mid-17th century to train priests for Ireland, Flanders and the Netherlands. When it was merged into the Irish College at Salamanca in 1785, its archive went there, and in 1951 on to Maynooth in Ireland. The University of Alcalá took over the building in 1996, and with funding from the Jefferson Smurfit Group it was restored and is now used to house foreign students.
Photo: Raimundo Pastor — CC BY-SA 3.0 Bishop Juan Alonso de Moscoso, a former professor at the Colegio Mayor de San Ildefonso, founded this minor college in 1611, and it is known as the College of Málaga because its first students came from that city. Of all the university's minor secular colleges it is described as the most grandiose, a model of Baroque architecture in Madrid, with two towers topped by slate spires. After the old university closed it served as an artillery school, a charity asylum and a boarding school, and since 1983 it has housed the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters.
Photo: Zarateman — CC0 This chapel and the 34-metre brick bell tower beside it are what remain of the church of Santa María la Mayor, where Cervantes was baptized in 1547; the rest was burned in July 1936, and the outline of its plan is marked in the paving. The first chapel was built in the early 15th century at the order of Pedro Díaz de Toledo, the royal judge, or oidor, of Juan II. Inside is a reconstruction of Cervantes's baptismal font, placed here in 1905 for the 300th anniversary of Don Quixote, and the chapel now holds an exhibition on the writer.
Photo: Zarateman — CC0 Cardinal Cisneros founded the Colegio Mayor in 1499 as the root of his university, and today the building is the rectorate of the University of Alcalá. Rodrigo Gil de Hontañón's limestone facade, begun in 1537 and finished in 1553, is laid out like an altarpiece in three storeys, with the imperial arms of Charles V near the top. Every 23 April, around the anniversary of Cervantes's death, the Spanish monarchs present the Cervantes Prize in the Paraninfo, the great hall Cisneros ordered, and the marble tomb made for Cisneros himself stands in the college chapel.
Photo: Zarateman — CC0
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